WWI 100 Years: Industrious R.I. turns to war effort

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Soldiers need weapons, uniforms, steel helmets and other gear, and industry in Rhode Island rallied to the cause when the nation entered World War I in 1917.

By Thomas J. Morgan

PROVIDENCE — Soldiers need weapons, uniforms, steel helmets and other gear, and industry in Rhode Island rallied to the cause when the nation entered World War I in 1917.

Even in the years before that, after the war began in Europe in 1914, “Rhode Island is making huge strides in the textile industry, in precision manufacturing,” said Morgan Grefe, director of the Rhode Island Historical Society. “There were industries like Brown & Sharpe, and the growing jewelry industry. This was very much a heyday for Rhode Island industry.”

The now-defunct Providence Magazine, a publication of the Providence Chamber of Commerce, drew this picture in 1918:

“Fortunately business of every kind is fairly humming. Workers are earning wages such as were never before heard of in this country, and industries are rapidly rolling up profits and we will be ready to answer the call.”

John S. Holbrook of Gorham Mfg. Co., which manufactured hand grenades, said of Providence later in 1918, “Her growth since the war is due to a considerable extent to the development of her normal industries of peace times into war industries…

“Brown & Sharpe have had a tremendous stimulation to their business owing to the fact that the tools and machines which they make are largely used in war industries. The same is true of the Nicholson File Company and the Builders Iron Foundry. Even jewelry concerns…are going into war supplies…

“I was in Peace Dale two or three weeks ago…and was told that 90 percent of their product was for the Government.”

Little written record

Yet just who built or manufactured what, and in what quantities, is not clear from the historical record.

“So little has been written about Rhode Island’s participation in [World War I] other than histories of artillery companies,” remarked Paul Campbell, Providence city archivist.

Providence Magazine hinted that at least one of the difficulties in keeping track of the economy during that time was what could be printed under wartime conditions.

After mentioning that the magazine was constrained by government censorship in what it could report, the publication added some wartime morale-building: “It was due to the ceaseless running of Rhode Island mills that our boys in France, as well as those who were undergoing intensive training in the cantonments and those who were on duty in the coast forts, were sufficiently and properly clothed, and that several of the plants made it possible for the boys in the trenches to deliver messages of such a personal character that the Huns, upon receipt of these immediately ceased to take further interest in the war, in fact everything mundane, and were looking for harps upon which to pick forever.…

“There was a great deal going on at Fields Point, where the Government caused the biggest boiler shop in the country to be built for the use of the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, and the Lord Construction Company erected many buildings of a temporary character the two plants being used in completing and outfitting the wooden ships built elsewhere at the order of the Emergency Fleet Corporation of the United States Shipping Board …

“Day and night, six days in the week, our plants were driven to the limit in supplying the wants of the men who were fighting for the democracy and the liberty of the world.”

An important role

Brown & Sharpe may not have been directly in the munitions field, but the company manufactured the tools needed to create munitions.

At Brown & Sharpe, 911 workers, or one in eight, enlisted in the armed forces. Of those who served, 19 died in the war or shortly afterward — 5 in battle, one in an airplane accident, and 13 of disease.

Among those who fell were Sgt. LeRoy W. Miller, the first Rhode Island serviceman killed in battle, and Sgt. Joshua K. Broadhead. They received the “Congressional Medal of Bravery,” according to a commemorative booklet titled “Memorial to the Employees of the Brown & Sharpe Mfg. Co. who served at home and abroad in the Great World War.” Miller also received from France the Croix de Guerre.

Included in the publication was a stanza from a poem by V.E. Atwell titled “La Fayette, We Come!” The reference was to paying back a debt to the Marquis de Lafayette, who aided Americans during the Revolution; a famous phrase usually attributed to U.S. Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing on landing in France with the Army during World War I said, “Lafayette, we are here!”

To us, amid the whirring wheels

At Brown & Sharpe’s, the summons came;

Each one the thrill of manhood feels

And answers proudly to his name.

And though some go, while others stay

‘Mid belts’ and pulleys’ ceaseless hum,

Each serves in his appointed way;

So, La Fayette, we come!

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